While National Citizenship Prohibits Secession, Its Elimination Makes Secession Unnecessary

Cliff Muncy

It’s good news that state rights are finally being discussed — and even secession, though that’s not what we advocate. We have to consider that while some form of “divorce” is perhaps desired, secession may truly be impossible as long as a national citizenship loyalty remains supported by the people. The “political bands” are held firmly in place, and the alleged states remain restricted, by the people, through their own loyalty to a national and quite equalizing protection. Every state is now the same/equal, by way of allegiance to being United States citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment.

When James G. Blaine commented on what the Fourteenth Amendment following Reconstruction was intended to do (and not simply how it has been “interpreted” by courts today, as many seem intent on expressing), he was quite clear that it was intended, from the beginning, to rid us of “that pestilent heresy” of state rights:

“As the vicious theory of State-rights had been constantly at enmity with the true spirit of Nationality, the Organic Law of the Republic should be so amended that no standing-room for the heresy [of State-rights] would be left.” (James Gillespie Blaine, Twenty Years In Congress: from Lincoln to Garfield, Vol 2, Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1884, 30)

Divorce in the way of secession isn’t an option, because the “husband and wife” this article speaks of have agreed openly and publicly, perhaps unknowingly so, that they no longer have the legal right to separate. Not only that, but they are no longer separate entities in a union.

If we realize how slim the chances of secession were under Lincoln, today’s chances are not only more slim, they are non-existent, because the states in large recognition today are not the same states we had. The states we have today are more states by name only. They don’t have lawful authority over the soil, much less to secede. In fact, most of the states have it encoded into their own state constitution that they *cannot* secede. NC Article 1, section 4, for example:

Secession prohibited.

This State shall ever remain a member of the American Union; the people thereof are part of the American nation; there is no right on the part of this State to secede; and all attempts, from whatever source or upon whatever pretext, to dissolve this Union or to sever this Nation, shall be resisted with the whole power of the State.

We have to realize that for every state that exists today there was a “twin” state, by the same name, that either was or could have been, had it existed in the union at the time, prior to the Civil War. What happened two years following the war was not a re-entering of states, as we are taught. It was the creation of new, foreign body politics composed for a completely new kind of citizenship — a citizenship for which the determination of protected rights would be decided and protected at the NATIONAL level, not the local or state level.

The irony of this construct is that the new citizenship loyalty created by the 39th congress would be self-perpetuating. It was dependent upon the people it created to sustain it. Just as this new form of citizenship was created illegally, the citizens created by it would uphold the original violation through the course of time. U.S. citizens, by continuing to declare themselves as such, under the Fourteenth Amendment, are inviting national control over their lives. The states we have now aren’t composed of state citizens. They are more like nationally controlled counties, composed of U.S. citizens. And herein lies a DRAMATICALLY important difference in the power that states have today compared to the power that states had prior to the late 1860s.

A state is defined by the people. When you nationalize citizenship, you no longer have a union of several. You now have a nation of one people who have agreed by their own admission to be led as one under a national morality.

Whether we desire divorce or we simply desire a proper relationship where the federal government is limited by *actual* states with state body politics (people loyal to states), the only real remedy we have, when we truly examine what we have and from whence we came — the only real remedy is to re-establish the states which were allegedly annulled by Reconstruction, to re-claim state citizenship in those re-established states, and as a people, to recognize only lawful forms of government as binding upon us. -CM